Saturday, January 12, 2013

Fitbit One

I have been using a +Fitbit for a while now. In the past few years, using a Fitbit has encouraged me to move more during the day.  I have had two of the original Fitbits, and one Fitbit Ultra.  I just got a Fitbit One and I was looking forward to the wireless syncing.

Sync we have switch to using Chomebooks as our main computers, it has been pain to sync my previous Fitbits.  I would either have to leave a PC or Mac running all of the time, or turn it on often if I wanted my activity data synced.  Uploading my data daily is useful when you are trying to compare your activity against your friends. What I ended up doing was turn on a computer when the Fitbit needed to charge.  This would sync about a weeks worth of data at once.  I was looking forward to the Fitbit One solving this problem, by adding the ability to sync through my cell phone, which I always have with me and is always on.

Unfortunately, wireless syncing doesn't work with my phone, so I still need to turn on a computer at home to sync.

One other downside of the Fitbit One is that they changed the single USB dongle that charged and did the wireless syncing with the Fitbit into two.  Now if I want to sync and charge my Fitbit, I need to use two of my USB ports.

I am still pretty happy with the Fitbit One, and am looking forward to being able to sync through my cell phone.


Thursday, January 3, 2013

Switched to Blogger

I moved my blogs to +Blogger from Wordpress.com.  Blogger has essentially the same functionality as WordPress.com but has better integration with +Google+.  Blogger also allows you to use a custom domain for free, while WordPress.com charges for this.

The conversion from WordPress went pretty well.  I was able to use the online conversion tool for one of of my blogs.  But since the tool only supports converting files up to 1MB, I needed to run the tool locally.  I also encountered a few other problems:

  1. WordPress.com supports special syntax that gets converted at display time, which creates the html for embedding content.  WordPress makes it easy to embed +YouTube and +Google Drive content, with out having to include the html.  When these posts are imported into Blogger, the inline content isn't shown.
  2. Blogger only supports 20 labels per post, while WordPress.com doesn't have a limit for tags.  I needed to remove these extra tags before exporting the blog from WordPress.
This is the 4th migration that I have done with my blogs, so I am sure that some links won't work in previous posts. My blogs were originally run on a self-hosted LifeType blog, then I migrated to a self-hosted to WordPress.org blog, and then I migrated it to a WordPress.com blog.

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